Preparing for holiday traffic was also the focus of a recent Google+ Office Hours Hangout. Check out the full video here.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/are-you-prepared-for-the-holiday-rush/feed/1Ready Your Site For Holiday Traffic: Google+ Hangout Recaphttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/ready-your-site-for-holiday-traffic-google-hangout-recap/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/ready-your-site-for-holiday-traffic-google-hangout-recap/#commentsTue, 01 Oct 2013 20:59:55 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=33374Brace yourself: the holiday shopping season is coming. If you are in the ecommerce industry you must be prepared for the influx of seasonal traffic as more and more people begin to shop online. We focused this Hangout on information we hope viewers will find beneficial as they prepare for one of the busiest times of the year. In addition to posting some of the highlights from the show below, I have embedded the entire video of the Hangout at the bottom of this post.

One of the first things you can do is set up a load balancer in front of your configuration. This will allow you to bring additional servers online to help support the traffic without having to make a DNS change, ultimately preventing you from having downtime to make that DNS change.

Drew discussed some of the best practices for creating a layered, scalable architecture. He emphasized that you want to have your infrastructure setup in a way that you can apply resources where resources are needed. For example, if your database is under load you want to make sure that you can focus the extra resources on that section of your stack; having a modular setup will help you achieve this.

Having a hybrid cloud solution is one way to handle heavier traffic by taking advantage of dedicated hardware alongside cloud hardware. If this is a solution that could be beneficial to your company, you want to begin this investigation now to ensure that all the gear can be set up for you to test on before the rush hits.

Load testing is crucial because you need to know the baseline of what you can handle. You can then scale your configuration and test again to see how that baseline might shift. Knowing what load would cause your site to fail is a very important data point to have as you begin planning for the holiday season. Our Cloud Tools partner New Relic can help you see when your site will go down, and also why it will go down. This actionable information is important.

These are some of the highlights of our Hangout on scaling for the holiday rush. I would encourage you to watch the video in its entirety and if you have any further questions be sure to give us a call at Rackspace. We will have our next Office Hours Hangout this Thursday at 1:00 p.m. CST and we will discuss hybrid cloud solutions for ecommerce. I hope to see you there!

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/ready-your-site-for-holiday-traffic-google-hangout-recap/feed/0Using Magento In The Hybrid Cloud: Google+ Hangout Recaphttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/using-magento-in-the-hybrid-cloud-google-hangout-recap/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/using-magento-in-the-hybrid-cloud-google-hangout-recap/#commentsTue, 24 Sep 2013 21:09:27 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=33204I know that it may be hard to believe, but the holiday shopping season is fast approaching. If you have an ecommerce site, or have aspirations to set up an ecommerce solution, you need to start preparing now.

During our Google+ Office Hours Hangout last week we talked about using Magento, an open source ecommerce application that can help you with your online sales. I’ve embedded the video of the entire Hangout at the bottom of the post, and you can check out the highlights below (however, you will have to pardon our “pirate patches” – we did it in the spirit of Talk Like a Pirate Day…arrr).

Racker Eric Cavalcanti was a former customer who has used Magento since its inception. He started using it when his wife wanted to run an ecommerce store. Eric gives a little information about his background, how he started one of the first blogs on Magento and became a Magento consultant.

With the holiday season coming up, Eric gives some pointers that a Magento user should get in place now in order to scale for seasonal demand. He suggests putting a load balancer in place, lowering your DNS TTLS, separating your web and database nodes, implementing a Content Delivery Network (CDN) and using technology to cache your content for snappier page load times.

Eric and I had a chance to talk about the advantages of the hybrid cloud, in particular the security of a physical firewall, increasing the database performance as well as having PCI compliant site. I go on to talk about how the cloud is not an “all or nothing” proposition—you don’t have to move your entire configuration to the cloud. Instead, you can move the pieces and workloads that make sense over to the cloud and keep the remainder of your stack on physical servers.

That’s the recap from our previous show, if you are an ecommerce customer or are looking to set up a Magento site, I would highly recommend watching the entire video below. We‘ll be back for our next Hangout this Thursday at 1:00 p.m. CST. We’ll share tips and tricks to prepare your site for increased holiday shopping traffic. You can sign up here to participate in the Google+ Hangout. We look forward to seeing you then!

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/using-magento-in-the-hybrid-cloud-google-hangout-recap/feed/0Get A Head Start On The Holiday Rushhttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/get-a-head-start-on-the-holiday-rush/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/get-a-head-start-on-the-holiday-rush/#commentsTue, 10 Sep 2013 17:00:46 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=32852This year’s holiday retail season is a week shorter than last year’s,according to the National Retailer Federation (NRF). How will you get the most out of your ecommerce website this holiday season? You can start by attending the free Early Planning is the Key to Online Holiday Success webinar.

Whitepaper: Peak Season Prep Guide: Preparing your Ecommerce Site for the Next Big Rush

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/get-a-head-start-on-the-holiday-rush/feed/0Serving From The CDN For The Holidayshttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/serving-from-the-cdn-for-the-holidays/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/serving-from-the-cdn-for-the-holidays/#commentsMon, 19 Nov 2012 14:45:41 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=24851A question that we get here at Rackspace is, “How many servers do I need to handle all my holiday traffic?” It is a pretty difficult question to answer because of all of the different variables. Because of the cost-effective nature of the cloud, one answer might be to overprovision and have extra resources to make sure that you site can handle a large amount of traffic. However, there is another way that not a lot of people think about: serving your landing page off of our Content Delivery Network (CDN).

Most people think about their cloud configuration having a load balancer up front with the web and database servers below it. Sometimes a spike of traffic might not let it perform the way you want it to. One way to mitigate this risk is to have a static home page served off the CDN.

Doing this leverages all the geographically dispersed servers across the globe, to make sure that when someone comes to your website, they are going to get that web presence of your landing page. Now, this page is not going to be dynamic, but your customers will be able to click through to access your shopping cart or application. Having a landing page on the CDN is a safe guard to ensure that you always have a landing page for your visitors to access.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/serving-from-the-cdn-for-the-holidays/feed/0Load Balancing For The Holidayshttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/load-balancing-for-the-holidays/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/load-balancing-for-the-holidays/#commentsWed, 14 Nov 2012 15:00:23 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=24847One of the best things that you can do today to prepare for the holiday rush is to put a Cloud Load Balancer in front of your cloud configuration. You want to do this now because in order to route traffic through your load balancer there will be some downtime associated with setting up the DNS and allowing it to propagate. There’s no time like the present to take care of this so you can take advantage of all the benefits the load balancer can give you in the holiday season.

The holidays seem to have the same effect on our server configuration as it does with our households. For example, for most of the year my kitchen table and chairs work to serve dinner to my family. However, when the holidays come and my house is jam packed with guests, we have to set up additional tables and chairs (some in the living room) to accommodate all the guests. Furthermore, you want to make sure certain family members sit together and that the kids have their own table. The load balancer does something similar for your server configuration.

As traffic flows into your site, the load balancer is really good at making sure that it goes to the right place. For example, if you have two web servers, the load balancer will ensure that one of them doesn’t get overwhelmed with traffic. It will route the traffic to the appropriate web server to make sure that the visitor gets the content as fast as possible. Much like separating the kids out to their own table, you can also set up rules to route different types of traffic to different servers.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/load-balancing-for-the-holidays/feed/0Tuning And Testing For The Holidayshttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/tuning-and-testing-for-the-holidays/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/tuning-and-testing-for-the-holidays/#commentsMon, 12 Nov 2012 18:00:59 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=24844Much like the big guy makes a list and checks it twice, we want to give you strategies to prepare your server configuration for the holiday traffic this year. An important thing to do to ensure that you are on your customers’ “Nice” list is to tune and test your cloud configuration.

The first thing to check is your web layer. Whether you are running Apache or IIS, there will always be an opportunity to change certain values and parameters to serve your content as efficiently as possible. Keep in mind, every time you launch a Cloud Server powered by OpenStack, those parameters are going to be fairly generic, so you will want to go in there to make sure that it is suited for you.

If you are running an application server, you want to make sure that the framework you are running it on, such as PHP, is tuned with the best values and parameters. You want to make sure that the server is tuned for both the code that you uploaded as well as the size of the server you are running it on.

Finally, you will want to optimize your database. There are a lot of different things that you can do to optimize your database layer, including caching, and we have a lot of resources in the Rackspace Knowledge Center that can help you out. Furthermore, our support team can advise you on other strategies to test and optimize your database traffic.

To check this list twice, we always encourage our customers to spend a little bit of time load testing their configuration before the big traffic rush hits.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/tuning-and-testing-for-the-holidays/feed/0Caching For The Holidayshttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/caching-for-the-holidays/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/caching-for-the-holidays/#commentsWed, 07 Nov 2012 14:00:32 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=24673Around the holidays, getting cash for a gift might make you think that the person didn’t put a lot of thought into your present. However, in the world of server configurations, giving cache to your customers is probably one of the best things you can do.

From Black Friday to last-minute Christmas shopping, the holiday season is going to put a lot of stress on your servers. I’ve written a white paper on many of the things to help alleviate that extra load on your server, but one of the quickest and easiest things you can do is use something called caching. So what exactly does that mean?

Anytime a person comes to your website, your website has to dynamically build a page. What caching does is take some of the commonly requested content and starts storing it in very strategic places so that it can be served fast to your customers. There are several places that you can take advantage of this caching technology.

One of the first places that you can use caching to your advantage is on your database server. This is one of the main engines that powers your website: it does a lot of reading, writing and distributing of data. Using an application called memcache helps make that process more efficient by serving your content faster.

In terms of serving your content, your web servers are going to get an increased load as well. This is the second place that you can cache. An application like Varnish, which can help store the created website, alleviating the load on the server from having to create the site over again when a customer clicks a link. This saves you a lot of time and computational load.

A third place that might be overlooked when caching is the load balancing layer. While most customers think of the load balancer as a network appliance, but based on how it is built into your infrastructure, you can load content there to serve to customers before they hit either your web or database server.

However, if you really want to get your holiday cheer out there as quickly as possible and as close to your audience as possible, there is nothing better than using the Content Delivery Network (CDN) that is built into our Cloud Files solution. By loading all of your static content onto a Cloud Files container and turning on the CDN, you’ll serve that content from our geographically dispersed servers, resulting in a fast load time for your customers all over the globe.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/caching-for-the-holidays/feed/0Scaling For The Holidayshttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/scaling-for-the-holidays/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/scaling-for-the-holidays/#commentsMon, 05 Nov 2012 18:00:57 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=24620The holidays are right around the corner and I want to make sure that you aren’t stressed out about your online configuration. So let’s start looking at how to prepare for the holiday rush as soon as possible. Today I will talk about scaling for the holidays.

From Black Friday to the first part of the New Year, many websites experience higher than expected traffic. This is especially true for e-commerce sites as people try to get their last minute shopping in. To handle that excess traffic, it is really important that your business has a scalability plan. There are two ways to scale your configuration in the cloud: vertically and horizontally.

Scaling Vertically

Vertical scaling is probably the simplest way to add more resources such as RAM, computational power or storage. In essence, you are going to make a larger cloud server. All you have to do is find your cloud server instance in the control panel and click a button to scale it up.

This type of scaling doesn’t require any refactoring of your code and you can do this at a moment’s notice. However, there are two drawbacks. First, there is finite scalability of how big your server can get. If you have scaled it to be as large as possible and the traffic is still overwhelming your server, it runs the risk of going down. Second, there is some downtime that occurs when your server has to shutdown to resize.

Scaling Horizontally

Horizontal scaling leverages the true power of the cloud. Instead of increasing the size of a single server, you’re going to take a page from Santa’s playbook on how he gets a team of reindeer to help him carry the presents into the night. Instead of having just one large server, horizontal scaling is about adding additional smaller servers to your configuration, as you need them.

The benefit of horizontal scaling is that you can scale almost infinitely. However, in order to take advantage of horizontal scaling you might need to make some changes to how your code works. If you are interested in horizontal scaling, want to see if you can use it with your application or have any other general questions about scaling for the holidays, feel free to contact us here at Rackspace.

]]>http://www.rackspace.com/blog/scaling-for-the-holidays/feed/0Prepping For The Holidayshttp://www.rackspace.com/blog/prepping-for-the-holidays/
http://www.rackspace.com/blog/prepping-for-the-holidays/#commentsFri, 02 Nov 2012 13:45:47 +0000http://www.rackspace.com/blog/?p=24542With the holidays fast approaching, you’ve probably got a lot on your plate. But before the stockings are hung with care, there’s a lot of work that needs to be done to make sure that your configuration can handle the surge of holiday traffic that starts before Black Friday and continues until the first week or so of the New Year. I’ve made a list, and checked it twice, of topics that can make this a less stressful holiday season for you. Over the next couple of weeks we’ll talk about: